Pete Townshend's Acceptance Speech

I want to thank a lot of people in our history, because the people that helped the group in the early days, and Ahmet mentioned some of them: Shel Telmay [?] who produced our first record, Kit Lambert, who produced later ones, and Glen Jones, who's a great producer for us, and Bill Szcimzick [?] - lots of people who've worked with us over the years. And I'd also like thank people who've helped us on the management side - Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp in particular. Pete Cameron was not really a frontline manager - he used to manage Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp... very badly. I'd also like thank right now our current manager, Bill Curbishly, and his wife Jackie. I'd also really like to say, and get this over really quickly, because you're all - you've sat through a lot of extraordinarily and wonderful emotional stuff tonight, just like last year, that it was last year that made me realize not only that I wanted to get back and play in America again, but it made me realize how much I love this music, this city, very much. New York is - if, as Seymour said at the beginning of the evening, if New York is what this is about, then I kind of agree. The Who have always had strong links with New York. But the music that we played, and messed around with, and busted up, and everything else over the years, has actually been rooted in and devoted to the more conventional, the more straightforward, and the more heart-oriented music that we've seen walk across the stage tonight. We've always felt an adjunct to rock and roll, as much as attempting to be a part of it. We've been an irritant to it, really, as much as being irritators, and today, as ever, we don't know what's going to happen next. We never have. But when Phil Spector talked about new music, particularly the music that is now being made on the streets, it's not up to us to try to understand it. It's not even up to us to buy it. We just have to get the fuck out of the way.